How Marketers Create Attention Grabbing Adverts

Do you want to know how marketers create attention-grabbing content and why it’s important?

In 2024, creating attention-grabbing content is essential for marketers to overcome the challenges of short attention spans, intense competition, and rapidly changing digital landscapes.

Businesses must connect with their audience, convey messages effectively, and drive success.

Marketing starts with content and the incremental improvements in customer data analytics that empower marketers to make more informed decisions, optimize their strategies, and achieve better results.

How can marketers create attention-grabbing content? It all starts with the marketer knowing more about the way humans tick and why they react the way they do to stimuli.

Successful attention-grabbing advertising is not just luck but also a ‘science.’ Let’s look at how we react to stimuli and why marketers need to understand it to craft content that rises above advertising fatigue.

Reaction To Stimuli

Why do some advertising and marketing videos, images, and content get a huge reaction and go viral when other professional campaigns fail to hit the mark?

To answer this question, we need to know about the makeup of the brain. Essentially, two core areas of the human brain deal with stimuli, i.e., information coming in.

Lizard Brain

We have our lizard brain, a.k .a. reptile or dinosaur brains. It’s the oldest part, and all animals have it. You’ve heard of the ‘ fight or flight’ response, and that’s the lizard brain at work. And this part of the brain steps up as our ‘first responder’ to stimuli.

In an earlier article going down the rabbit hole of marketing, we mention how important it is for marketers to appeal to the lizard brain, i.e., wake up the recipient or consumer to get them to pay attention to your message.

So, how do you activate the lizard brain successfully?

Over the years, we’ve become desensitized to advertising in all its glory, albeit there are exceptions like the Super Bowl adverts. These adverts are first class and have a captivated audience of millions. However, even so, these adverts so need they appeal to our lizard brain, and they do. There are clips of perilous activities, and plus, take note of how many adverts there are for food, satisfying our primitive brain’s need to avoid hunger.

Super Bowl Adverts

Super Bowl adverts use ‘first responder’ stimuli to create impactful, emotional messages that resonate with viewers. These ads aim to honor and acknowledge the efforts of first responders while eliciting strong emotions from the audience. Some of the ways include:

• Tapping into emotions to create a memorable event
• Heroism stories that focus on bravery or selflessness
• Incorporating real-life footage
• Partnering with charities where some Advert proceeds go to them

There is the other part of the brain that needs engagement. The limbic system provides emotion and feeling, and the neocortex has two components: the brain’s rational thinking and the most intelligent part.

Emotions And Feelings

The limbic system is responsible for emotion and feelings, so your advertising campaigns must also speak to your emotions. In many ways, just like the lizard brain, the limbic system is very instinctual, reacting rather than processing information before taking action.

According to HBR (Harvard Business Review), create content that will demand the attention of your lizard brain and use emotion to disrupt the status quo of consumers to get the sale.

We have interpreted the HBR article as saying you can use words and images to create that sense of urgency to appeal to both parts of the brain that will react without first applying logic.

Some of the emotions you can appeal to in your marketing and adverts include fear, hurt, greed, pride, joy, disgust, guilt, and love.

Use these feelings to disrupt the status quo with messages insinuating that the current position is no longer tenable and is detrimental to your life, health, or job. Now the consumer is alert and willing to take action, i.e., follow the instructions in your advert, i.e., click here, call this number, etc.

Summary

The brain can be targeted by marketers in such a way that consumers willingly pay attention to advertising. The psychology of the brain in marketing is a huge topic worthy of ongoing discussions.

We know there is no room for right or wrong or black-and-white thinking regarding the science of emotional buying. The Super Bowl adverts, for example, are less about the product’s virtues, which would appeal to our neocortex, and more about stimulating the emotions and first responder areas of our brain.

Attention-grabbing content will deal with limited attention spans due to the abundance of online content by cutting through the noise.

When people find content interesting, entertaining, or valuable, they are more likely to interact with it, share it, and potentially convert into customers or brand advocates.

Staying relevant and adapting to changes in consumer behaviour, technology, and popular culture helps marketers connect with their audience.

Now, consider your own campaigns. Are they working in the same way, or do you need to be more innovative with your choice of words and images? If you’re now thinking about your marketing, you’re on the right path to success.